The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson (review)

Prior to the lynching of Emmett Till in August 1955, African American activists pursued a multitude of paths to equality and justice during the long-term struggle for legal citizenship. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision was both the culmination and commencement of the legal portion of the modern civil rights movement. In response to Till's murder and the acquittal of the perpetrators, activists across the country mobilized their discontent into a movement that upset the social and political order of the United States. As a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement, the lynching of Emmett Till is central to any understanding of the national movement for equal rights. In The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy B. Tyson synthesizes a variety of primary and secondary sources into a compelling narrative of Till's life and legacy that offers a window into the local and national conditions that precipitated the murder and the responses to Till's lynching.

Tyson spends the majority of the book retelling the well-known story of Till's lynching and the subsequent trial in an attempt to create a concise narrative of the event and its impact. He uses newspaper reports, interviews from other historical sources like the documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement (1987–1990), archival collections, Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson's Death of Innocence: The Story of a Hate Crime That Changed America (New York, 2003), and Carolyn Bryant Donham's unpublished memoir to construct a detailed account. Tyson spends much of the book offering biographical accounts of the central figures—Till, Till-Mobley, Donham, and the murderers. He also offers an elaborate narrative of the convergence of activist circles in Mississippi, Chicago, and beyond that helped fuel the national response to Till's lynching. In short chapters that move the narrative along, Tyson summarizes the nature of segregation in Mississippi and Illinois, Till-Mobley's calculated response to her loss, and the realities of justice and white supremacy in 1955. By contextualizing Till's lynching, Tyson offers a fuller picture of the event's immediate impact on the burgeoning movement.

While much of the book relies on widely known details of the lynching and its aftermath, the most notable features of the book are Tyson's interview with Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman at the center of the still unclear encounter that instigated Till's lynching, and Tyson's access to her unpublished memoir. In her conversation with the author, Donham admitted that the version of events she described in her testimony during the trial of her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, John Williams Milam, was fabricated. Tyson dispenses with any suspense surrounding her perspective early in the book. In the first chapter, Donham admits that she did not "'remember'" what actually happened when she and Till interacted at her husband's grocery store (p. 6). During the trial, Donham suggested that Till physically accosted her and offended her with sexual innuendo. Throughout the book, she attempts to distance herself from the crime, but she does concede, "'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him'" (p. 7). Though her perspective adds some biographical depth to the narrative, it does not provide much in terms of new information.

With The Blood of Emmett Till, Tyson brings together a variety of sources to provide a narrative history of a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement and attempts to draw parallels and connections to the calls for justice and equality of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement.